Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Types of Content

In speaking of complex content, we mean an Element that may have other Elements as children. As noted earlier in the chapter, all such elements are of a complex type. Schema language provides several content models, but a single one of them, sequence, is used in nearly all cases in business document schemas. The full set of content models is listed below. There are constraints on the content models beyond what I state here, but these definitions should give you the general idea.

• sequence: As the name indicates, sequence represents a series of Element children in a specific order. This is by far the most commonly used. If you turn back a few pages to SimpleCSV1.xsd you can see complex types defined with sequence for Row and the ...